Favourite Abba Song

A couple of weeks ago, Scot McKnight was asking for our favourite song by Johnny Cash. Now he is asking for our favourite Abba song. Scot's is Dancing Queen, and he embeds a nice Youtube of Abba miming it in Australia in 1976. I think this is obviously the correct answer. I am not going to try to be cute and disagree. It's not just Abba's best song; it is one of the best pop songs of all time. Full stop. My favourite moment in the recent Mamma Mia film (my comments) was the blink-and-you-will-miss-it cameo from Benny during Dancing Queen.

Nevertheless, as an Abba obsessive, I am not one to let an opportunity like this pass by without a bit of extra comment. So here goes. If Dancing Queen has a serious rival, it is Take a Chance on Me. This is another perfect pop song, this time enhanced by a perfect video. By this stage in their careers (early 1978), their videos were not simply a matter of miming on stage with microphones, and this video is one of the great pop videos, so good that it feels almost indistinguishable from the record. When you hear the song, you think of the video. It does not feel like an afterthought. Cheery, quirky, feel good, funny; it is a bad mood buster:



If you had asked me back in my fanboy days, though, I would have given a different answer. In fact, I did give a different answer when interviewed about Abba on BBC Radio Derby as a teenager. "The Winner Takes it All" is the true Abba fan's answer to the question. Those who claim that it marks the real maturing of Abba from happy pop combo to performers of intense, emotional pop are not familiar with earlier material like "Knowing Me Knowing You", but it is clearly one of Agnetha's best vocal performances. After the unbelievably dire Meryl Streep rendition in Mamma Mia, it's necessary to remind ourselves how great the original was.

If I were to compile a top ten, I'd want to throw in other classics like "Fernando", "Name of the Game" and "Gimme Gimme Gimme" but also a very much underrated entry, Abba's last but one single, released in 1982, "The Day before You Came":



It gives you an idea of how great they would have continued to be if the public had not fallen out of love with them.

Post Mamma Mia: An Abba Fan's Delight

My concerns were groundless. I loved every minute of Mamma Mia. It's delightful. True, there were moments where the big stars were thrashing out Abba songs with great gusto and looking like they might ruin them, Meryl Streep's doing her best with "Winner Takes it All" but leaving you longing for the original with Agnetha's vocals, but those moments were relatively few and far between. The backing track, apparently supplied by Abba's own musicians, was sublime, and there were moments when you almost felt that you could hear Agnetha and Frida on backing vocals if you listened hard enough. And during "Dancing Queen" there was a great little cameo from Benny, playing the piano on the jetty.

I was unfamiliar with the story of the musical and I was pleasantly surprised by how well Abba songs had been woven into its absurd, fluffy, but enjoyable plot. On odd occasions the songs felt more obviously shoe-horned in than they might have been. Brosnan's character singing SOS came from nowhere, Streep's character's "Winner Takes it All" likewise. But the musical avoids doing anything seriously horrible; there are no characters knocking around called "Fernando" or "Nina", thank goodness. And on several of the occasions where the songs are a little forced, the characters themselves appear to realize it. Julie Walters's ridiculous call of "Chiquitita" to Meryl Streep (hiding in the toilet) is hilarious. And sometimes the choice of songs is unpredictable and quite refreshing. I did not immediately think of "Our Last Summer" when Colin Firth's character, a "banker" named "Harry" was introduced at the beginning of the film. And while most of the songs chosen are the "hits", there are other good choices of the lesser known tracks, the kinds the fans like, "Slipping through my fingers", Meryl Streep and her daughter Amanda Seyfried in a tear-jerker, "Lay all your love on me", Amanda Seyfried on the beach on her fiancé's stag night, and "When All is Said and Done", at the wedding at the end.

I found watching this film unbelievably enjoyable, a whole gushing series of emotions, laughing out loud and crying quietly. It is totally unsophisticated; it has the most ridiculous plot imaginable; it ought to be the most terrible film you could think of and yet somehow it works and works brilliantly. A huge part of that is simply that Abba's songs are just so good that it is the musical to trump all musicals. Where sometimes in musicals you sigh when someone begins to sing, in this film every time another song starts, you think, "Great! Another fantastic song." But there is also something about the brainless enjoyment that invites you in to celebrate alongside all the characters so clearly having a party. You want to sing and dance with them. And it might sound daft to say it, but somehow the film looks like Abba songs sound. There is a kind of joyful optimism, a love of life that does make you think of the sunshine, the seaside, laughing, crying and celebrating.

This is just wonderful. While everyone else is raving abut Dark Knight here, and I too will get round to seeing that over the next few days, I can't think about anything other than Mamma Mia and I can't wait for my second viewing, as soon as possible, and then a third and a fourth.

Mark Kermode delivers his best review over -- he is absolutely spot on about this "strangely wonderful" film -- I laughed out loud at his review:

Pre Mamma Mia: An Abba fan's anxieties

Anyone who knows me knows of my love for Abba. And that does not mean that I have a copy of Abba Gold on CD and know all the lyrics to "Dancing Queen". It means that I have a serious past as an Abba fan, a massive record collection, all the 1970s memorabilia including the (now very rare) Abba dolls, an appearance on Radio Derby, circa 1982, as "local Abba superfan", an article about me, with picture, in the Abba Magazine (again circa 1982), and I could go on. I was so serious back in the day that I was there for the first performance of Chess at the London Barbican in October 1984, sitting on the front row, and meeting and getting autographs from Bjorn, Benny and Tim Rice. Well, time, family and other interests have mellowed my obsessive tendencies, especially on the collecting front, but my love for Abba is still the same, and so it is with mixed feelings that I look forward to going to see the new film Mamma Mia, which opens today here in the USA. One one level, it is great to have Abba songs so much in the limelight, to see people appreciating what I always knew, that they were brilliant. On another level, I am not sure how I feel about having the likes of Meryl Streep and Colin Firth singing Abba songs, and a look at the trailer makes me suspect that it is all going to be rather silly:



As an Abba fan, I can't help thinking that I will just want to hear the real Abba songs when I see the actors doing their best with them. One of the things that was so great about Abba was the Abba sound, Benny's piano and the girls' voices; it was not just about those catchy melodies. When Alan Partridge says that he prefers the "Jeff Love Orchestra" version of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" that he uses for his radio show, we all laugh because it is so obviously not true. In fact, many of my records are cover versions of Abba songs, and 95% of them are absolutely terrible. Reproducing the Abba sound is virtually impossible -- it's like trying to reproduce the Beatles. Even the very good tribute bands like Bjorn Again only get a hint of what Abba actually sounded like. Even Abba themselves sometimes struggled to recreate the Abba sound live, especially if you compare the 1979 concert footage with the earlier, sublime 1977 footage in Abba The Movie.

I was encouraged, though, by a documentary we watched last week on ITV about the development of Mamma Mia in which it became clear that Bjorn and Benny, the two Bs in Abba, are closely involved with the production of the film, as they were earlier involved with the stage production. Remarkably, the original musicians who played on all the Abba tracks (sans Agnetha and Frida) have been gathered together for the score of the film. There they all were, looking a bit fatter and older, gathered to recreate the magic. And that should make the music at least worth listening to, even if we do still find ourselves longing for the proper voices over the top of that revised backing track.

We never managed to get to see the stage show of Mamma Mia; it opened when the kids were little and we were poor and we could never swing it to get to London to see it. So I go into the film today with only a vague knowledge of the story, and so some degree of freshness. I will let you know what I thought of it all later.